Ancient Rome Development
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Ancient Rome developed from a small prehistoric settlement on the Tiber River in Latium in central Italy into an empire that encompassed all of the Mediterranean world, and the civilization that resulted formed the basis for modern Western civilization. The genius of the Romans lay in the military, in government administration, and in the law, and they valued crafty diplomacy as much as military discipline. The Romans conquered Greece, adopting Greek culture and transmitting it to the medieval world. Unlike the Greeks, they did not develop a philosophical theory of state and society. Instead, they were the practitioners of power and law, and Roman civil law, which reached its peak under the emperors, excelled in precision of formulation and logic of thought. However, it was a law of inequality and social prejudice which also became part of the Roman heritage. Roman political institutions remained relatively stable during the imperial centuries and then disintegrated rapidly as the empire collapsed. Greece developed a number of lasting disciplines--the drama, philosophy, politics, and so on. The origins of the drama are evident in the works of Aeschylus, and these plays center on Greek religious thought. The Suppliant Maidens, for instance, shows how the Greeks saw the gods not as some distant concept but as operating in daily life. The Danaids, or daughters of Danaus, are dedicated to Artemis, and Artemis as a daughter of Zeus is chaste. She is a virgin, as are
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that each was "most useful and serviceable to the interests of their countries" (Plutarch 37).
While the Romans adopted many Greek literary genres, they invented one of their own in the biography. Plutarch was one practitioner, and Suetonius another. Moses Hadas writes in an introduction to one edition that this development indicates a difference between the Greeks and the Romans:
It may seem odd, in view of men's consuming interest in other men, that the world had to wait for so long for biography, that the classical Greeks, who were notoriously anthropocentric and who pioneered most of our literary forms, were so slow in developing biography as a literary genre (Hadas viii).
Hadas further notes that the people described in classical literature, like those depicted in classical art, tend to be idealized. The public career of certain Greeks was included in various histories, but these again were idealized portraits related to public affairs. Thucydides was interested in individuals only as they affected history. The systematic study of lives for their own sake was introduced by Aristotle, but Plutarch and Suetonius had different aims. Plutarch directed his attention to ethics and delves into the lives of his subjects in
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Approximate Word count = 1306
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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